Section archive - Trends in Jewish Education

Nathan Jeffay writes about seven descendants of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng in China who have come to study Judaism in Israel and rejoin the Jewish People. Kaifeng’s Jews are said to have been merchants from Persia or Iraq who made their way eastward along the Silk Road and established themselves in the city with the blessing of the Chinese emperor. The Kaifeng Jewish community was founded over a thousand years ago, numbering in the thousands; however the community disintegrated in the mid-19th century, with the death of its last rabbi, and those members that hadn’t done so already intermarried and dropped most aspects of religious observance. The seven men in Jerusalem are descendants of this community in which families retained a sense of Jewish identity and, in some cases, in a manner reminiscent of the Marranos of Spain and Portugal, clung to some disjointed traditions.

In this post, Dr. Aster describes a second pilot of a Hebrew literacy skills class carried out during the 2009-10 school year at Yeshiva University for entering students with the very lowest scores on Yeshiva College's Hebrew Placement Test . On the basis of the experience acquired during the first pilot of the course offered during the 2008-9 school year, many changes were made in the curriculum and the pedagogical approach of the course. The results were a high level of achievement of the students in acquisition of Hebrew language skills.

Adam Dickter writes about families in the NYC area who are fed up with having to fight the system of Jewish day schools to ensure that their special needs children get a proper Jewish education. They feel that yeshivas and day schools have been reluctant to expand inclusion or explore creative new ways of integrating special-needs students.

In a post from the eJewish Philanthropy's Growing Jewish Education in Challenging Times series, Eli Gottleib, Vice-President, Mandel Foundation-Israel and Director of the Mandel Leadership Institute, kicks in about growing Jewish education in challenging times, disagreeing with some of the premises of the ongoing debate.